Vengeful Spirits, Divine Punishment, and Natural Disasters Catastrophe and Religion in Japan
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Religious Studies in Japan volume 3: 3–20 Satō Hiroo Vengeful Spirits, Divine Punishment, and Natural Disasters Catastrophe and Religion in Japan Without scientific knowledge, the people of premodern societies in Japan tried to understand natural disasters through their association with transcendent beings (kami). In ancient Japan, natural disasters were interpreted as messages, that is, vengeful curses, from the kami. With the establishment of a systematic cosmology during the middle ages, the causes of catastrophes were explained in terms of the law of cause and effect according to which punishment and salva- tion were delivered by the kami. With the onset of the early modern period, the sense of reality inherent in the perceptions of fundamental beings declined, and the salvation of the dead could no longer be entrusted to the other-worldly kami. People then came to terms with catastrophes as natural disasters that must be faced. Rituals and customs, carried out over long periods, were put in place to raise the dead to the status of ancestral spirits. In addition to a shift from the tra- ditional world in which kami, the living, and the dead coexisted, to a shutting out of the latter group, the process of “modernization” brought with it a restructuring of society around the exclusive rights and interests of human beings. The Great East Japan Earthquake has been an opportunity to reconsider the path ahead, and to reconsider responses to catastrophe which display the modern tendency to focus on the concerns of the living to the exclusion of those of the dead. keywords: natural disasters—catastrophe—vengeance—the Great East Japan Earthquake—modernization Satō Hiroo is a professor in the history of Japanese thought, Graduate School of Arts and Letters, Tohoku University. 3 n 11 March 2011 an extensive area stretching from the Kanto to the Tohoku regions was struck by a strong earthquake. This was the Great East Japan Earthquake. Within minutes, an enormous tsunami, fre- Oquently described as “unprecedented” and that came on the heels of intense tremors, took the lives of close to twenty thousand people. This natural disas- ter has had a great impact on the Japanese people in various ways, but particu- larly important among these is the fact that it made modern Japanese once more aware of the closeness of death. There cannot be too many people living in the disaster zone who do not have relatives or friends affected by the catastrophe, including myself. Many, having barely escaped themselves, had to witness the horrific sight of seeing people they knew being swallowed by the waves. A majority of Japanese saw the images of people, cars, and houses swept away by the tsunami in the media. Many wit- nessed death from close up. It goes without saying that death is a reality for everyone. There is no excep- tion. It is not only us who are branded with the fate of death. For one person to live, the death of many living beings is unavoidable. Humans carry with them the shadows of uncounted deaths and are themselves fated to incessantly march towards the final destination of death. However, is there actually any opportunity in modern Japan to realize this state of affairs? In their everyday lives, most people rarely have to see somebody who is dying. It is almost inconceivable to see the emaciated figure of a corpse. It is also difficult to imagine the forms of once living cows, pigs, or chickens based on the dismembered and packaged meat filling supermarket shelves. Death, wrapped tightly in a shroud and scrupulously hidden from view, is removed from everyday life. Even to announce aloud that everyone has to die is regarded as taboo. As if one could escape death by simply not talking about it, contemporary Japanese have lowered their voices and averted their gaze from death. It is because contemporary society has taken this form that the Great East Japan Earthquake, which made us aware of the reality of death, could strike such strong disquiet into our hearts and minds. * This article is translated from the original Japanese that appeared in Shūkyō Kenkyū 宗教研究 86(2), 2012, 133–56. 4 satō: catastrophe and religion in japan | 5 Disaster as Fate With one stroke, the disaster of 11 March unleashed the questions surround- ing death, which had been sealed up for so long by people in modern Japan. Whether people were directly affected by the disaster or exposed to images of it, all were overwhelmed by that horrifying black wave surging forward and swal- lowing everything in its path. Through this event, we learned the hard way that however one tries to avoid it, it is impossible to escape an undeserved death. I was on my way to the Shinkansen station in Sendai when the disaster struck. If I had chosen a plane for transportation, I would have been hit by the tsunami on a road close to the airport, in a parking lot, or inside the airport terminal. A slight coincidence or whim would have changed my life. It must have been the same for other people as well. The disaster of 2011 cost the lives of many who carried no personal responsi- bility for the catastrophe, but this was not the first time the Japanese people have experienced wanton mass death. We had already experienced the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995, and if we go back even further, to the first half of the twen- tieth century, there was a time when all of Japan was utterly devastated. Towards the end of World War II, the sight of the burnt bodies of bombing victims litter- ing roadsides was commonplace, regardless of their degree of complicity in the war, their age, or gender. Apart from tsunamis, the Japanese islands have continuously been ravaged by disasters that are beyond human control. Most representative of these are famines. Famines costing the lives of people continued until the beginning of the Showa era (the late 1920s). The struggle with famine was a burden that the Tohoku region in particular had to carry.1 Famines occurred in succession. People exerted themselves in order to pre- pare for their onslaught. They also prepared for years in which there was a poor harvest. However, in the case of a prolonged famine such as the so-called Four Great Famines of the Edo period that occurred once every few decades, there was not much that could be done. Famines in the Tohoku region were caused by cold weather damage to crops. At the time of the great famine of the Tenmei era in the second half of the eigh- teenth century, the famine was further exacerbated by the outbreak of Mount Asama. Smoke covered the sky and ash rained down like snow. The effects of the cold wave and the volcanic smoke interacted, leading to a record-breaking cold summer. The harvest was dramatically reduced, resulting in many famine victims in northern Tohoku. In the Hachinohe domain, it is estimated that the population was halved in just a few years (Hachinohe Shi 1976). In the fifth 1. Regarding famines in the Edo period, see Kikuchi (1997). 6 | Religious Studies in Japan volume 3 (2016) year of the Tenmei era (1785), Sugae Masumi (1754–1829), who visited Tsugaru, described the marks left by the famine: “Arriving at the village, like patches of leftover snow, white human bones were strewn all throughout the grass, or piled up in heaps” (from “Sotogahamakaze,” Sugae 1971). People had to struggle hard just to survive. Whatever could be eaten, from wild grasses to the bark of trees, was completely consumed. The first to be sacri- ficed were household animals. Dogs and cats were turned into food. There were even cases in which people were forced to feed on human flesh. On the other hand, in order to reduce the number of mouths to feed, the culling of the weak was practiced. All across eastern Japan, for example in places such as Shinshū or Tōno in Iwate Prefecture, there are legends about abandon- ing old people (ubasute), although their veracity has not been established. However, it is certain that this was something that was also actually practiced in some instances. For instance, there was the custom of infanticide known as the “culling of seedlings” (mabiki). As Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) describes in his Kokyō nanajūnen (1971), mabiki was still widely practiced in eastern Japan when he was a child during the first half of the Meiji period. There are still many extant examples in places of votive tablets (ema), which were written in order to stop infanticide. According to Yanagita, who saw one himself, it was “a ghastly thing showing a woman with a headband wrapped around her head in bed smothering a newborn child” (Yanagita 1971, 21). Yanagita reminisces in his book that there was a “sense of having to eradicate famine at all costs” (Yanagita 1971, 23). This was born out of the experience of the horrors created by famine that formed the original impetus for his inquiries. Despite the prohibition of infanticide issued by the feudal lords, mabiki did not disappear from the world of the commoners. Someone had to be sacrificed so that others could live. This era in which people were repeatedly forced to make the ultimate choice between two lives continued on in the Japanese isles. People carried on living in order to pass on the torch of life to the next generation, with despair carved deep into their gut, and enduring cruel tribulations. The Discovery of the Kami Even Japan, the country with the most advanced systems for predicting earth- quakes and tsunamis, was unable to avoid misery in 2011.